1. Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to processing of documents, and more specifically relates to processing of scanned documents in computer systems.
2. Background Art
Computer systems have vastly improved the efficiency of many modern workers by providing ways to quickly and efficiently generate and handle electronic documents. Many software tools have been developed that generate and/or process electronic documents in various ways, including word processors, spreadsheets, databases, scanning software, web page development systems, content management systems, hypertext markup language (HTML), extensible markup language (XML), etc. It has long been the goal of many people in the information processing field to realize a “paperless office”, which means an office where physical paper documents are completely replaced with electronic documents. One impediment to realizing the goal of a paperless office is the great number of different types of documents that a typical business receives from outside sources that must be processed.
When a paper document is received by a business that is striving to realize the goal of a paperless office, the paper document is typically scanned into electronic form. However, in order for the document to be digitally filed in a structured filing system, the document must have indexing information added to the scanned document. Examples of indexing information include: document type, customer number, contract number, dollar amount, and other suitable metadata that describes the document. The process of manually entering indexing information for each scanned document has been a significant bottleneck in the realization of the goal of a paperless office. For each paper document that is scanned, a human operator must scan the document, then manually enter indexing information to allow the document processing systems to recognize, store and retrieve the new document. With a company that receives hundreds or thousands of paper documents each day, this requires a dedication of significant resources to scan the documents and enter the corresponding index information. Many companies prefer to do business by processing the papers instead of dedicating the resources to adapt their business systems to converting the papers to electronic documents, then processing the electronic documents.
Various systems have been developed to allow a user to more efficiently enter indexing information for a document. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,192,165 and 6,427,032 owned by ImageTag, Inc. disclose systems in which a user creates index information in a record in a database for a paper document before the document is scanned, places a label with a unique identifier on the paper document, then scans the paper document. The system detects the label with the unique identifier, locates the index record in the database that corresponds to the unique identifier, then stores the scanned document with the index record in the database.
Many offices still process a significant number of paper documents in their day-to-day operations. Many are not making efforts to get upgraded to process electronic documents instead of paper documents. Yet many people, even in environments that have little infrastructure for processing electronic documents, still need the ability to scan a paper document into electronic form, then process the electronic document in some fashion. For example, let's assume an attorney hires a draftsman to create patent drawings for a particular client, and receives a paper invoice from the draftsman for creating the drawings. The attorney may want to scan the paper invoice, then e-mail the paper invoice to the client. Most offices today use digital copiers that scan paper documents and produce from the paper documents one or more electronic documents. In a typical office environment with a digital copier, the attorney in the example above would have to scan the document to electronic form by typing a series of instructions at the digital copier keypad, locate the electronic document on the network, copy or move and possibly rename the electronic document to a desired location, create an e-mail to the client, attach the electronic document to the e-mail to the client, then send the e-mail to the client. This process is very daunting for many office workers, especially those who are not very technically-inclined. The attorney may have to seek help from the firm's information technology (IT) department to determine where on the company's network to find the documents for a particular digital copier on the network. In addition, the user may have to take different steps depending on different models of digital copiers that are available. There are so many hurdles in accomplishing this simple task of e-mailing a paper invoice to a client that the attorney may deem it more efficient to simply fax the invoice to the client. A fax of the invoice is yet another paper document that now must be processed by the client, which further exacerbates the goal of reducing paper in an office's workflow. Without a way to easily process scanned documents using software that is user-friendly and very easy to use, many workers will not have the skill or patience to process scanned documents using known tools.